Python Challenge 2013: Hunting snakes in the Everglades

Hunting pythons, as nearly 1,500 hopeful hunters registered in Florida’s “Python Challenge 2013” have discovered, is a “Where’s Elmo” game of finding a nearly invisible snake that could be right under your nose — or foot.

Brains versus brawn would bag a python, Chris Harmon was convinced.

But after three weekends of peering at the Everglades through an infrared camera that registers animals’ body temperatures, the Boca Raton information tech specialist hasn’t spied a python. However, the gadget makes a handy gator locator.

“We saw all these huge bodies under the water and said, ‘OK, we’re not going there.’”

Adam Gearhart of West Palm Beach figured hunting snakes while growing up in Indiana would give him an edge.

“Pythons are like garter snakes, right?” joked Gearhart.

He, too, came up snake eyes, after two long days of hiking deep into the Everglades with three friends.

Hunting pythons, as nearly 1,500 hopeful hunters registered in Florida’s “Python Challenge 2013” have discovered, is a “Where’s Elmo” game of finding a nearly invisible snake that could be right under your nose — or foot.

Concerned about the snakes’ rapid spread through the Everglades, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) organized the four-week Challenge, which ends February 10. Those who bag the most snakes get $1,500; the biggest snake nets $1,000.

One thing is clear: The snakes are fairly easy to catch but confoundedly difficult to find.

Almost anyone willing to tramp through razor-edged saw grass and endure boot-sucking muck can hunt this slithering form of bio-pollution that may be growing up to 20 feet long on Florida’s wild lands. Worried wildlife officials say the invasive snakes may be pushing native mammals to the edge of extinction in the southern Everglades.

But one thing is clear halfway into the hunt: The snakes are fairly easy to catch but confoundedly difficult to find.

CATCHING BY LISTENING

Why are they so hard to track down? A python’s brown and black coloration blends seamlessly into the Everglades’ winter mantle of dry grasses.

“I’ve actually stepped on them without knowing it,” said Bergeron, an FWC commissioner, after docking his custom airboat at a Tamiami Trail canal.

Bergeron has been pressing home the python problem by taking elected officials hunting on the tree islands dotting the ‘Glades golden saw grass prairies. Although Sen. Bill Nelson came up empty-handed on a recent safari with Bergeron, professional snake hunter “Python Dave” Leibman helped a Miami-Dade county commissioner catch a 9-foot python.

Leibman held the snake’s head while a Telemundo reporter wore the still-live snake during a stand-up.
Bill Booth found his first python by listening.

“I’ve never heard a sound like that,” said Booth, a Myakka City firefighter and lifelong outdoorsman. He and his hunting partners had motored their boat deep into the saw grass, then scrambled up a levee to look around. “It was a slow rustling of something big in the grass, not fast like a gator or a mammal.”

They’re beautiful animals, but they don’t belong here.

After some bare-handed snake wrestling and momentary panic — where the heck is the shotgun? — the snake in the grass became a live snake in a bag.

It was as big around as the fire hoses Booth uses on the job.

“They’re beautiful animals, but they don’t belong here,” said Booth, admiring the snake’s satin-smooth scales a few hours later at the drop-off site where hunters bring the day’s catch. “I feel like we’re helping save the Everglades.”

The snake was so big that University of Florida technicians had to stretch it out on the gravel road. It wouldn’t fit inside their tent.

One of the state’s partners in the Challenge, UF is performing the necropsies that yield crucial information for scientists. Stomach contents will reveal what the snakes are eating; DNA analysis might be able to link the snakes to a particular ancestor, the Patient Zero of pythons, likely a released former pet.

Booth’s python was longer than the technicians’ 10-foot tape measure. After a second tape measure was located, Booth heard the verdict: he’d snagged an 11-foot, 6-inch monster snake.

Fist bumps all around.

HUNTING PYTHONS ISN’T CHEAP

A big, no-nonsense guy who considers himself a conservationist as well as a hunter, Booth took a leave of absence from his job to hunt snakes through the vast gold and green landscape of the southern Everglades. He’s sleeping in a small tent at a campground where a sign warns the area is panther country.

Making eye contact with a python requires a large outlay of time, patience and gas money.

According to his GPS coordinates, Booth covered 540 miles the first week, by boat, truck and on foot. In two weeks, he spent $800 in fuel.

Winning would not only defray costs, but the awards ceremony on Feb. 16 would make a fine 48th birthday present, and perhaps fulfill a dream.

Booth, who also is an award-winning taxidermist, hopes to have his own hunting show. The publicity from winning might capture the attention of an outdoors network.

Making eye contact with a python requires a large outlay of time, patience and gas money.

To that end, his partners, Dusty Crum and Duane Clark, also from Myakka City, document Booth’s snake-snagging abilities on video, hoping to edit it into the pilot of a TV show. At the same time, a National Geographic crew has been following Booth while taping their own documentary, making a meta moment in the swamps.

Booth would rather turn the snakes in alive, but the Challenge’s rules stipulate pythons must be killed in the field, from a gunshot to the brain (Booth’s choice); a blast from a captive bolt (the weapon Javier Bardem’s psychotic killer used in “No Country for Old Men”) or decapitation.

A frustrating week goes by with only one more snake caught. Then, pay day.

Booth and his crew are now bumping down a saw grass-fringed levee in Booth’s camouflage-painted truck when they spot what every python hunter would trade his snake chaps for: two snakes sunning side-by-side in a clump of dry brush.

Leaping from the truck, Booth and his crew grab the snakes’ tails while trying to avoid the snapping, darting mouths lined with four ferocious rows of backward-curved teeth.

After gripping the captured snakes carefully behind the head, the men wind them into an Army-green duffel bag, then place the bag behind the driver’s seat before nonchalantly continuing their search.

“Snakes on a truck,” someone jokes.

FEW SNAKES IN THE GRASS

To try to contain the snakes’ relentless spread through southern Florida’s wild lands, the FWC decided an open-invitation “incentive hunt” with cash prizes of up to $1,500 would drum up interest in hunting them.

They didn’t expect “Pythonathon 2013.”

The combination of Florida’s mysterious Everglades infested with huge exotic snakes chased by a gun-wielding, camo-clad crowd of hunters proved irresistible to sportsmen and media alike. On opening day Jan. 12, hunters bristling with guns, snake sticks and bravado set off into the Everglades, followed closely by a media herd brandishing cameras, boom mics and tripods.

With a purported tens of thousands of slithering targets, everyone anticipated easy pickings, as if grabbing a snake with the girth of a sewer line can ever be easy.

Yet, more than halfway through the monthlong hunt, almost all of the hunters have come up snake-less.

How many pythons are spread over 1.3 million acres of Everglades? No one really knows.

According to the FWC, which organized the hunt, 37 snakes were turned in by Tuesday, an average of about two snakes a day (0r .02 snakes per hunter.) Friday’s count was released too late for publication.

“Based on the hype, I thought I’d have 30 or 35 snakes the first day. Instead, I’ll be lucky to get that many the entire hunt,” said Booth.
By the middle of last week, Booth only had five snakes, likely enough to put him in the money for the contest.

How many pythons are spread over 1.3 million acres of Everglades? No one really knows.

“A lot,” said UF wildlife biologist Frank Mazzotti, one of the architects of the python hunt. “Honestly, any number you give after that is going to be wrong.”

Scientists do know the first python was caught in the Everglades in 1979, but few were reported until the 21st century, when the population seemed to explode.

In the first 11 months of last year, hunters caught 132 snakes. In 2011, they bagged 169 pythons.

The snakes are there, Booth agreed, if you’ve got the time and patience to find them. He estimates each of his catches required about 45 hours of hunting.

For casual hunters, that’s too much peering and poking for too little payoff when there’s a cold beer waiting down the road.

That leaves the Everglades’ new apex predators free to loll around inaccessible canal banks like basking cats.

Sooner or later, a meal will stroll by, since a big snake can dine on almost anything in the swamp: raccoons, opossums, wading birds, alligators, even a panther.

Unless the snakes have already devoured most of their food sources.

THE SSSOUND OF SILENCE

Experienced hunters say they’re shocked at the empty stillness of the southern Everglades.

“It’s a wildlife desert,” said Booth. “We’re not seeing many animals of any kind.”

Between 2003 and 2011, a survey reported that rabbits and foxes in the area have vanished.

Raccoon sightings declined 99 percent, opossums 98 percent and bobcats 88 percent, according to the study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Two years ago, water district workers killed a 16-foot python containing an undigested 76-pound deer.

It’s a crime, agreed Mazzotti, but we don’t yet know who or what is guilty.

“Pythons certainly have motive, means and opportunity, so you can indict them, but indictments don’t always mean a conviction,” said Mazzotti, who said man-made changes in water movement and pollutionalso might be culpable.

For now, hunting seems the best option to keep the lid on python proliferation, hence the creation of the Python Challenge.

“For every python removed, another wading bird will survive to next year,” said Mazzotti. “It’s like getting a criminal off the streets.”

Today, Sheriff Bill Booth is somewhere out there in the saw grass, trying to make the the ‘Glades safe for Florida’s critters.

“I still want to catch a super snake — one more than 14 feet long,” he said. “Imagine what that’s been eating.”

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AND THE WINNER IS …

And the award for the longest snake goes to … Paul Shannon of Fort Myers, who hauled in a 14-foot-3-inch Burmese python in Florida’s Python Challenge.

Winners of the month-long Everglades snake hunt were announced February 16 by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at a ceremony at Zoo Miami.

In the professional snake hunters’ category, Ruben Ramirez of Kendall took home three prizes, including the grand prize for catching 18 snakes.

What does it take to be a champion snake hunter?

“Perseverance,” said Ramirez, who estimates he and his crew, who call themselves the Florida Python Hunters, walked about 150 miles and drove 500 miles of canal levees in 26 days of hunting.

More than 1,600 hunters signed up for the Challenge, which netted a total of 68 pythons.

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During Florida’s first python hunting season in 2010, a wildlife biologist reflects on his experience and personal battle trying to restore the Everglades by eradicating the animals he has dedicated his life to saving.

Howard is right. Considering how long it took for our lumbering government to even conclude there is a snake problem, we are now waaaaay behind the eight ball in fixing this situation. Florida is only throwing water balloons at this problem when they need an all out war to eradicate these snakes. Guess where they will show up next when there’s no food left in the glades? They will eat pets and children in our neighborhoods.
There needs to be a bounty on every snake according to weight and a weekly bounty for most caught so the hunters don’t ignore the small ones. Sad to say it may already be too late.